HITAC meeting today

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QUICK FIX

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D.C. may be snarled by snow, but your correspondent and the eHealth team are chugging along through it. Here’s the latest:

— HITAC meeting today: The Health IT Advisory Committee will coverthe office’s new interoperability rules and its annual report.

— E&C wants Facebook answers: In the wake of our report about Facebook’s faulty privacy settings for health data, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s top Democrats want answers on the embattled company’s health privacy gaps.

— FDA: About that young blood ... FDA is warning patients off from the faddish and unproven practice of infusing “young blood” to fight off aging and disease. One tech company is already modifying its offerings.

“Friend: “I know this guy who gets driven from Atherton to SF every day.”

Me: “That’s not uncommon.”

Friend: “He gets driven in a van, and the back of the van is set up with a @onepeloton and a TV, so he gets his workout in on his drive to SF. How common is that?”

Me: ..”

WEDNESDAY: Hope everyone had a nice long weekend. Your correspondent hates to look the gift horses of long weekends in their presumably pristinely toothy mouths, but he can’t help air a pet peeve: that they’re concentrated in the beginning of the year. Can we distribute the weekends a bit more evenly? Suggest long weekends for the remainder of the year at dtahir@politico.com. Talk long weekends socially at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

QUICK FIX

The meeting is scheduled to cover the committee’s annual report to Congress on priority policy areas for health IT; they’re shooting for a “spring 2019” timeline for completion.

Next, the committee is scheduled to talk over the new interoperability and IT rules that has consumed everyone’s attention since last week’s release.

Just to recap some of the early reactions to the two agencies’ rules: The American Hospital Association doesn’t like the mandate for required notification of admission, discharge and transfers of inpatients; and app developers think EHR vendors are putting up too many hurdles for API access. We’ll see what the committee thinks about these concerns, or what new issues might’ve caught their eye.

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IN CONGRESS

E&C WANTS FACEBOOK ANSWERS: Top Energy and Commerce Democratssent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday requesting a briefing on the platform’s privacy policies for “closed” groups, where patients might share personal health information with other members facing similar health concerns.

Citing Mohana’s report from Monday about a consumer complaint filed with the FTC in December, committee chair Frank Pallone and Jan Schakowsky, who heads the consumer protection subcommittee, said they wanted to "better understand Facebook's practices" for closed groups and those whose titles include the word "anonymous."

Patients might be sharing information in such groups that puts them at risk of discrimination, wrote the lawmakers -- and the platform’s privacy policies could be misleading about what’s actually visible to outsiders. The pair requested a briefing from the company by March 1.

Schakowsky this week also announced a Feb. 26 hearing on data privacy and security, citing Facebook’s “problem after problem in how your data may be used." The hearing is intended to help develop data privacy legislation, a hot topic on Capitol Hill these days.

INSIDE THE HUMPHREY BUILDING

FDA WARNS AGAINST 'YOUNG BLOOD' MARKET: Trying to tamp down an increasing and alarming trend, the FDA cautioned consumers against getting infusions of young blood to fight off old age and disease.Tech startups and others had touched off a frenzy for the idea, but the agency on Tuesday warned that the treatment had “no proven clinical benefits for which the clinics are advertising,” and in fact many risks.

The agency will take regulatory and enforcement action "to protect patients from unscrupulous actors and unsafe products ... that abuse the trust of patients and endanger their health," the release announcing the warning said.

One startup offering the procedure at $8,000 a pop, Ambrosia Health, has already announced it’s ceasing treatments on its website.

— Also in FDA news: Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Tuesday circulated an all-hands email, via our Health colleague Dan Diamond, crowing about the $211 million boost the institution had secured in the latest budget deal. Gottlieb said the funding would be devoted to some familiar goals: more use of real-world evidence as well as digital health regulatory work.

ELSEWHERE IN THE ADMINISTRATION

— How’s the moonshot doing?: Our colleague Sarah Owermohle notes that the cancer moonshot initiated in the Obama administration had a lot of groundwork that President Donald Trump’s new push to eradicate new HIV transmissions might not have.

"Having been involved myself in State of the Union writing, I know there is a wide gulf between what is aspired to and what happens," said Greg Simon, who led the previousWhite House's moonshot task force before becoming president of its private-sector next phase, the Biden Cancer Initiative. "I don't judge based on what the aspiration is, I judge on what happens."

Simon says the moonshot has continued to power forward, after Congress pushed through double President Obama’s funding request. The private sector and government share that enthusiasm.

"I've been doing this since 1989...and have never seen the community so engaged with each other, working together," said Elizabeth Jaffee, a cancer immunologist at the head of American Association of Cancer Research and co-chair of NCI's Blue Ribbon Panel, the group that set out its moonshot goals.

It remains to be seen whether the HIV initiative will get the same sustained attention. Readers can get the full story here.

— More interoperability RFIs: Trouble keeping track of interoperability-related requests for information? The National Science Foundation has another. The agency, in case you missed it, issued an RFI last week asking respondents to discuss how they’re helping medical devices and data platforms to interoperate, and what they perceive the federal interoperability vision to be. Comments are due March 15, and you can get the full details here.

— New podcast: CMS has launched a new podcast; its first episode covers the agency’s E&M coding overhaul. We covered the controversy over the original version of the rule, which CMS dialed back some after outcry from doctors.

ACROSS THE POND: Meanwhile, England’s National Health Service has put out a report on its workforce and the digital future. The report, which was shepherded by digital health thinker Eric Topol, is studded with scads of recommendations, including training for clinicians in genomics; disseminating more reliable health care information for online surfers; and ensuring that citizens are involved with the creation of AI software.

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About The Author : Darius Tahir

Darius Tahir is an eHealth reporter for POLITICO Pro. Before joining POLITICO, Darius worked for Modern Healthcare (where he covered health care technology) and the Gray Sheet (where he covered medical devices and digital health).

Darius graduated from Stanford in 2009 — meaning he absorbed just enough sunshine and tech optimism to develop a fascination.